The New York Times editorial board is greeting this weekend’s armed defense of a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas, against would-be terrorists with a small amount of relief and a big barrage of criticism aimed at the “hate speech” that supposedly provoked the attack.
The American Freedom Defense Initiative’s weekend contest, which attracted nearly 200 attendees, had nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with “anti-Islam” “bigotry” and “hatred,” the Times declared in a Thursday editorial.
“[T]he Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest … was not really about free speech. It was an exercise in bigotry and hatred posing as a blow for freedom,” the editorial board wrote, pillorying AFDI and its founder, Pamela Geller.
The editors argued that the contest’s organizers, who had the foresight to hire heavy security for the Sunday event, are lucky that their provocations didn’t end in mass murder as the attackers had intended. The two would-be terrorists, Nadir Soofi, 34, and Elton Simpson, 30, were shot and killed by a police officer before they could carry out their assault.
Referencing the jihadist massacre in January at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the Times’ editorial board argued that the intentionally provocative French publication is more worthy of defense than the American group, arguing that Hebdo lampooned everyone – not just Muslims.
Geller and her “venomous” blog, on the other hand, are explicitly “anti-Islam” and that’s something that cannot be forgotten, even after two Islamists nearly massacred 200 people on American soil, the Times wrote.
The Islamic State has claimed credit for the thwarted Texas attack and one of the assailants had previously been investigated on terrorism charges, but it is unclear whether this attack was directly connected with international jihadist organizations. It’s believed that the attack in Paris earlier this year is connected to an al-Qaeda offshoot.
“Ms. Geller revels in assailing Islam in terms reminiscent of virulent racism or anti-Semitism,” the editorial board wrote Thursday, adding that AFDI’s “hateful” contest “achieved its goal” of coming under attack by jihad-inspired assailants.
“Those two men were would-be murderers. But their thwarted attack, or the murderous rampage of the Charlie Hebdo killers, or even the greater threat posed by the barbaric killers of the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, cannot justify blatantly Islamophobic provocations like the Garland event,” the Times opined. “These can serve only to exacerbate tensions and to give extremists more fuel.”
The Grey Lady’s editorial board conceded that there may be a few cartoonists who “earnestly believe” that drawing Muhammad somehow strikes “a blow for freedom” (although the Times later states that it doesn’t see how this is possible).
“As for the Garland event, to pretend that it was motivated by anything other than hate is simply hogwash,” the editorial board wrote.
After the terrorist assault on Charlie Hebdo, which claimed the lives of 12 people, the Times refused to publish the magazine’s supposedly offensive Muhammad cartoons, with Executive Editor Dean Baquet explaining at the time that the images were simply too obscene for publication.
“Have you seen them? They are sexual, and truly provocative. They are not the ones a handful of papers have run. Those are mild. If you really want to understand the issue, you would have to show the most over-the-top images,” he told the Washington Examiner’s media desk in January. “And they don’t meet our standards. They are provocative on purpose. They show religious figures in sexual positions. We do not show those.”
The Times hasn’t always been so sensitive to the feelings of others.
In 1999, the Times published Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary,” a painting of Christ’s mother fashioned entirely out of feces and adorned with cutouts of genitalia from pornographic magazines.
In 2005, 2006 and 2010, the Times also republished anti-Semitic cartoons in full.
The Grey Lady also published cartoons with racist overtones as recently as 2009 and 2011.
